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A global mindset is critical for global leaders' success in building bridges across cultural boundaries, but its true benefit comes when they act as global entrepreneurs and leverage that mindset to create value. That value may come in the form of an innovative new product, a new mode of operation, new forms of financing, or solving existing problems. Global entrepreneurs are both social and political innovators, reaching across boundaries of place and sector to forge value-creating partnerships among business, government, and civil society. They are boundary spanners and “bridgers.”¹³

Entrepreneurship may take place in new start-ups or within big companies; it might be a social innovation or a hit product. Value, in our definition of entrepreneurship, is not limited to financial returns for investors but includes other forms of individual, organizational, and social benefits.

Global entrepreneurs create value in many ways. They can tap commonalities, or convergence, between markets and cultures. Conversely, they may tap differences, or divergence. More often than not, they do both. They may rely on convergence around certain technologies to gain access to new markets, while leveraging divergence to adapt their supply chain to the available resources of each country.

Global entrepreneurs may also create value by tapping networks that allow solutions to more widely scale across geographies and sectors. Networks can be as literal as the telecommunications or transportation systems that allow ideas and goods to travel long distances. Or they can be as figurative as the business platforms that allow companies in one place to connect with complementary firms in another. Where the networks do not yet exist, a global entrepreneur may create value by building them.